I began translating Isthmus Zapotec poet Víctor Terán in early 2008, from an anthology of contemporary indigenous poets I picked up on one of my many trips through Oaxaca, where I had spent time in several Zapotec communities. That translation project resulted in a remarkable friendship, first stoked over mezcal-boiled plums in Oaxaca City and further strengthened by a three-week tour of the UK in 2010. Over the course of our relationship I found myself increasingly inspired—not just by Víctor’s poems, which often combine an erotic pastoralism with a sonic delight I aspired and struggled to replicate in my English-language translations, but by his activism, his vision to strengthen the Zapotec language and culture by the act of writing poetry.

David Shook has a project to produce five chapbooks of translations of indigenous-language poetry of Mexico that also has collaborative art and film efforts going into the mix. (He also has an awesome moustache.)

Los Angeles-based artists Ben Rodkin and David Shook are collaborating to document the life and work of contemporary Isthmus Zapotec artists and poets, by producing both a short-subject documentary film and a 5-chapbook set of indigenous Mexican poetry.

But if you’re right, and people are thinking hard about his premises, some of those people are bound to find them uncongenial or unsound, because, as you say, they’re bizarre. In a way, Aira’s writing is designed to have detractors, at least for a start, and they won’t all be bad or unsophisticated readers (although I think they’ll be missing out). If his books met with no resistance, that would mean that they weren’t upsetting accepted standards for judgement and setting new ones, which is what they’ve done in Argentina, where Aira is a strong pole of attraction and repulsion. If the debate doesn’t happen in North America, that might tell us something interesting about the segmentation of the reading public there.

I placed my preorder for César Aira’s Varamo a couple of days ago (along with three other books, I’m pleased to say). Looking forward to it. Hit the link to read translator extraordinaire Chris Andrews talking about it. [via Center for the art of Translation]

Enrique Vila-Matas was one of those love-at-first-sight writers for me. I read Bartleby & Co. quite a bit ago and I fell immediately in love with his work. These things are always sort of dangerous, because you very well know that even the greatest writers produce really unimpressive books sometimes. But you know, as with all loves at first sight, you basically lose your capacity for rational expectation.

I didn’t read any of his other stuff until last year, when Never Any End to Paris arrived in my mailbox. It quickly affirmed his place in my literary constellation. So a couple of weeks ago, when my mood was essentially in the pits, I placed an order for Montano’s Malady, hoping that it would pick me up somehow. It’s funny how one comes to depend on one’s writers sometimes.

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P.S. The stuff in the background is some paper on Shakespeare I’ve yet to read, not government missile defence plans or anything.

Let’s suppose that the person who didn’t come was Jacques Henric. While J.-J. was waiting for him, Henric was riding a 250-cc Honda motorcycle to the entrance of the apartment building where the Devades live. But no. That’s impossible. Let’s imagine that Henric simply climbed onto his Honda and rode off into a vaguely literary, vaguely unstable Paris, and that his absence on this occasion is strategic, as amorous absences nearly always are.

There is a brilliant Roberto Bolaño story, “Labyrinth”, over at the New Yorker. [via The New Yorker]

There is also a companion interview with Barbara Epler of New Directions, where she talks about how they ended up picking up the bulk of Bolaño’s work. [via The Book Bench]

Finally, there is a sort of guide-to-Bolaño article running in parallel at the same place. I don’t think it’s very good. It doesn’t seem very well-considered. And not just because of the line below. [via The Book Bench]

You have to go back to Balzac and Dostoyevsky to find masters of the novel form who showed so little interest in the sentence. Indeed, Bolaño seems to disdain Jamesian refinement and polish, and this disdain is of a piece with his broader skepticism toward literary people, or merely literary people—those whose hunger for books is unmatched by a hunger for life.

I’m more in the Epler camp:

But all in all, for me, with Bolaño, as with all truly great writers, I can’t say just how he casts the spell whereby we sense something essential about life and death, something we’ve always known but cannot say, or how he gives me so much joy: he just does.

I wrote my first post for this blog promising very little. I think that was a good strategy.

[2]

A year ago, I started up this page with the idea that I would use it to share links and news of interest. A year. I didn’t quite think it would make it to a year. I was entering this half-thinking that it would peter out in three weeks and I’d shelf the idea for some other stage of my life. I’ve been blogging for a while now. I know the cycles that these projects can assume for me.

[3]

No, I’m not about to get all sentimental. But it is the birthday of Who Killed Lemmy Caution?, and I figured that in lieu of being extremely creative or extremely concise, it wouldn’t be so bad to have a look at what went well and what didn’t go so well in our first year.

We’re doing well, in a sense. We survived. We’ve had a good go at being diligent with postings, without this blog being (let’s be honest) a huge priority in my life. We’ve covered a reasonable range of stuff, if I dare say so myself, ranging from the more serious to the more eclectic. I mean, honestly, we even shared news about Jeffrey Eugenides’s vest.

We’re not massively popular. No way. We average somewhere between five to ten views a day. That can feel like a bit of a letdown sometimes, but other times, it’s called exceeding expectations.

So in a way, we’re not doing all that bad. Not superb, but not bad.

[4]

A look at my tag cloud tells me that my favourite topic appears to be Radiohead, followed by Bob Dylan, Samuel Beckett, and David Lynch in that sort of order. Also in the conversation are Roberto Bolaño, Björk, and James Joyce. I didn’t predict this sort of skewed representation (towards music) at the start, but I suspect most of it is down to the fact that I cover a smaller group of musicians as compared to writers. This is somewhat verified by the fact that my most popular category remains Literature (145 posts), with Music in second place (102 posts).

[5]

I don’t like to make promises with these blogging things. They’re like New Year resolutions (although it is appropriately the Chinese New Year): You either make them to fail or to succeed all too easily. That said, one of the things I would like to see in the future is more time spent onwriting long-reads of a sort. So far, I’ve taken to calling these Features. I haven’t had great success in producing a lot of content like this (actually, I only had four for the year) for a few reasons. Chiefly, I don’t make any money from this, and because I do have a lot of other work in a number of other places, it often becomes difficult to prioritise writing at length for this blog. Another reason (excuse, what-have-you) is that I didn’t plan to do so initially. The plan was simply to share stuff about the things that I like or love, and anything else would be a bonus. Having not planned for it, I had no consistent way of making it work.

And a third reason: we didn’t gain as much traction as we would have liked. I would have loved doing interviews and the like, but it’s simply not feasible at this stage of the blog’s life.

No promises, as I said, but I hope to do more of this in the future. I won’t be doing serious criticism like I do at school or anything as yet (that would probably be a tad optimistic) but I will try to write more in the way of impressions, special features (like last year’s Summer Reading List), event coverage, and maybe one or two surprises. I don’t think the blog will gain a tremendous amount of traction in the coming year, but if it does, it might also make talking to various people easier, thus giving us more content.

Another thing I would like to do is to live up to a promise that I made or an intention that I had a year ago. I’ll try to bring a bit more attention to the arts and culture scene of Singapore. My own fields of interest definitely do not aligned 100% with the arts in Singapore, being concentrated more usually in Europe, Latin America, and China, but there’s lots of good work in these parts that I should definitely be talking about more.

[6]

Happy birthday, WKLC. And to all the people who’ve stuck with us, it’s no luxury cruise liner, but here’s to even better times on our little drunken boat.